In the end, it wasn't about Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. It was about the lakefront.

George Lucas didn't court Chicagoans. He never made the equivalent of a visit to the front parlor to ask if he might build his narrative arts museum (whatever that was) in the city's front yard. He seemed to consider city approval a matter of entitlement. Mayor Rahm Emanuel carried his water. Lucas' wife and spokeswoman, Mellody Hobson, made an ill-considered statement about Chicago's "young black and brown children" being the losers if the museum left town.

Lucas himself was like the man behind the curtain in "The Wizard of Oz" — the unseen force pulling the levers, known to everyone but accountable to no one. He did not deign to speak to reporters. He denied their requests to see the collection of traditional and digital art that would be housed in what many wrongly thought was solely a "Star Wars" museum. He wouldn't consider sites west of Lake Shore Drive, even though plausible ones were offered.

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

George Lucas speaks in Hollywood, California, on June 9, 2016.

George Lucas speaks in Hollywood, California, on June 9, 2016.

(Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

It was going to be his way or the highway.

Enjoy the ride, George. On Interstate 80, it's a 31-hour, 2,126-mile drive from Chicago to San Francisco, though a billionaire movie mogul probably makes trips like that in a private jet.

After nearly two years worth of off-putting, arrogant silence from Lucas, the supreme irony Friday was that it fell to him to announce that he was withdrawing his proposal to build his museum in Chicago.

Naturally, he took a parting shot at Friends of the Parks, the nonprofit environmental group that tied up his plans in federal court and was brutally demonized by Emanuel and other supporters of the museum.

"The actions initiated by Friends of (the) Parks and their recent attempts to extract concessions from the city have effectively overridden approvals received from numerous democratically elected bodies of government," Lucas said.

There was no mention of U.S. District Judge John Darrah. (Unlike Donald Trump, Lucas at least had the good sense not to verbally assault a federal judge.)

It was Darrah who carefully weighed the ramifications of the public trust doctrine, which holds that governments are obligated to protect certain natural resources, like the formerly submerged lands along Chicago's lakefront, for the public's use.

It was Darrah who let Friends of the Parks' case against Lucas proceed, thereby checking a "fix-is-in" political process that had Emanuel, the City Council, Gov. Bruce Rauner and the General Assembly doing Lucas' bidding.

Though the case never went to trial, Darrah is the real hero of this titanic struggle. Without him, Friends of the Parks was powerless. Also without him, the case could have set a dangerous precedent. It would have allowed the powerful and wealthy to foist their vanity projects on the people's shoreline — and control those edifices for decades, even centuries, to come.

The Lucas Museum now joins a long list of high-profile projects in Chicago that never made it off the drawing board, from the Civic Center Plaza to the Spire to Chicago Gateway Harbor.

And so, almost exactly two years to the day after he picked Chicago on June 25, 2014, Lucas is headed back to California, where his first plan for the museum was rejected by a national park board in San Francisco. The city he'll select has yet to be announced.

Some will say that the loss of this $743 million museum is a blow to Chicago's economy. That's true, but the pain could have been averted if Lucas had dropped his intransigence and accepted a site west of Lake Shore Drive. Such a switch would have demonstrated that the project truly was rooted in a desire to benefit the city's children, rather than build a monument to its namesake.

Others will claim that the museum could have extended Chicago's rich tradition of architectural innovation by realizing the design of Chinese architect Ma Yansong.

But that bizarre design — which drew comparisons to Jabba the Hutt's palace, piles of road salt and nuclear power plants — was never right for the lakefront. It was an icon wannabe rather than a modest, naturalistic statement. It would have been a preening object — a product of the same arrogance as Lucas' telling silence.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 26, 2016, in the News section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Lucas reaps the bitter fruits of arrogance - Filmmaker acted like he was entitled to piece of lakefront - Cityscapes" —
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